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Friday, May 31, 2013

Skullfuck Mountain Wizard Magic

For Skullfuck Mountain (hereafter SFMTN), I'm using the Dying Earth Spells for D&D supplement. A magic-user's beginning spells are determined by rolling for them per the guidelines in the document:

So basically they begin play with read magic (which is the only 0-level spell in the supplement) plus three randomly determined 1st-level spells.

The magic-user has access to all spells known, but is limited in spells castable per adventure by the charts in the Holmes rulebook (and I guess for beyond level 3, I'll just use the charts for the wizard from the d20 SRD, since Men & Magic already has a discrepancy at 3rd level, and that bothers my OCD side).

Interesting that I'm using Dying Earth spells and not requiring memorization, isn't it? Do you see the irony? DO YOU!?!?!

So now the question becomes "How does the wizard advance the number of spells he knows?" Well, I figure all additional spells will be gained by learning them from scrolls or spellbooks found while adventuring. I've put together a pretty basic procedure for attempting to add a found spell to the collection of spells known. It is loosely built around Holmes' scroll creation rules, but I figure the time component will just always be one week. We generally assume one week of time passes between dungeon expeditions, so the magic-user will get one roll between each session of play. They can opt to wait additional weeks if they want, I guess, which reminds me, I need to make an events chart of stuff that happens in the dungeon and surrounding areas to make downtime matter. One event per week seems like too much, so maybe a 1 in 4 chance of an event each week, which would make things roughly monthly. Anyways, I digress. Here is the procedure for learning new spells:

Showing my true nerd colors with this flowchart

As far as limiting spells known, Holmes already has a chart for that, and if I find that too restrictive I could just use INT score as the maximum spells per level a magic-user may know.

Another thing I'm thinking about, but haven't quite figured out yet, is corruption. After playing DCC, I don't know if I could ever play without corrupting magic again. Just an idea off the top of my head that will require further thought: